The End of Men: And the Rise of Women, Hanna Rosin, Riverhead, 320 pages

From just a few weeks in, my high-school life was dominated by a single activity: interscholastic policy debate, also known as “cross-ex” or “team” debate. I had always been both a bookish and a highly verbal kid, social but not very socially adept, and in debate I found an activity that played to all of my strengths. Competing for the Bronx High School of Science, I could even delude myself into believing that, as a debater, I was one of the cool kids—at least in comparison to the geeks on the math team.

Sophomore year I was promoted to the varsity level, and my partner and I began to face teams with two or three years of competition under their belts. We won some rounds, lost others, but I don’t remember ever being awed by the competition, ever thinking, “Jeez, am I ever going to be able to measure up to that?”

Until we faced Hanna Rosin.

She and her debate partner, David, were juniors from Stuyvesant High School, our local rival, and they were exceptionally sharp. Hanna in particular had a way, in cross examination, of slipping a pair of logical handcuffs on you without your noticing, and then calmly filleting you before the judge as you writhed, unable to defend yourself, much less strike back. And she did it all with an amused little half-smile. I wanted to destroy her. I wanted to be her. And because there’s something undeniably exciting about being butterflied by a woman’s wit, I wanted—well, never mind.

Suffice it to say that we faced them eight times over two years, lost all eight rounds, and I’m still not really over it. So you can imagine my excitement when the opportunity presented itself for me to review her first book, The End of Men. Unfortunately, I found the book to be thought-provoking and engagingly written. So much for round 9.

The title is a bit of a misnomer, and the book itself a bit of a collage—a survey of various aspects of life in (mostly) America in the 21st century and how power relations between men and women have changed in the past generation, in a way that Rosin understands to be both historic and permanent. The eight chapters cover the following topics:

The “hook-up” sexual culture of the contemporary American college (and post-collegiate) life.

The ways in which highly educated couples are navigating the two-career household, developing what she calls the “see-saw” marriage, in which partners take turns being the primary breadwinner.

The rise of female-headed and -dominated households among the traditional middle and working classes.

The increasing roster of professions that are turning into primarily female preserves—without, she argues, becoming low-wage occupational ghettos.

The striking rise in the female crime rate.

The remaining challenges extremely high-performing women face in rising to the very top in different professions.

And, in a brief foray outside the United States, the ongoing transformation of the highly patriarchal South Korean culture in the face of the same economic and cultural forces that, in her view, have inexorably transformed the United States.

The thrust of the book, as the title suggests, is that these trends are related, and what they portend is, on the whole, very good for women but a mixed bag for men (and children). Her chapter on the hook-up culture, for example, takes pains to argue that, far from being evidence of male chauvinism run amok, that culture is sustained primarily by women. A substantial portion of college women, of course, don’t participate at all, and most of those who do treat it as a vacation: a way of letting off steam after a relationship goes bad or after an especially grueling studying schedule that leaves no time for a relationship at all. Only for a small minority of women does the hook-up culture become a lifestyle—and who are we to gainsay their pursuit of happiness?

Rosin’s approach is similar with the decline of marriage in the working and (increasingly) in the middle classes. As male earnings have stagnated and long-term male unemployment has spiked with each recession, it has been less and less obvious that marriage is a financially winning proposition for women who are capable—steadily more capable—of paying their own way. It’s one thing to take on a man as a provider and protector, but why saddle yourself with one merely as a responsibility? The women Rosin describes in her third chapter sound exhausted. But they don’t sound unhappy, certainly not when they consider the available alternatives. Even the crime chapter suggests that the rise in female criminality is but the inevitable dark side of empowerment.

Yet while this frame is a good one for selling books, I’m less convinced of its analytical utility. “Is it good for women?” is a question for an advocate, not an analyst. And as ideological feminism becomes less and less relevant to American women’s daily lives—because some of its core assumptions have been largely absorbed by the culture, while others have been discarded without fanfare—it’s past time to ask the whether sorting the population by gender might not itself be promoting a species of false consciousness.

The picture Rosin paints of women in the professional classes, after all, diverges widely from the picture of the working and middle-middle classes. The college women Rosin describes are highly motivated, organized, and goal-directed. They seem destined to conquer. Whether they actually will all conquer, of course, may be questioned. A female executive friend of mine, when I described Rosin’s argument, laughed and said, sure, it’s easy to find plenty of women who are highly organized and diligent and so forth. But finding women with the requisite analytical skills and creativity to do the work she needs done is much more difficult, and she usually winds up hiring men.

The same native talents that Rosin thinks make it easier for women to succeed more readily than men at school may handicap them later on. A future in which middle management is dominated by hyper-organized women isn’t quite what Rosin has in mind, but it’s at least as plausible an extrapolation from her data as a future of female dominance from top to bottom.

But assuming they do conquer, will they all be able to marry up, if the sex ratio among the college-educated passes 50-50 and approaches a 3-2 ratio of women to men? Obviously not. Some will by choice or necessity seek a dominant role vis–à–vis a more nurturing, home-centered man. Some will work out “see-saw” arrangements. Some will marry “peacock” men, who may not be big earners but are exceptional ornaments—great musicians or conversationalists, or just plain lookers. And some, of course, will marry up. But the details of these arrangements really are best left to the people in question—the interest of an outside observer is pretty much limited to the prurient.

As for the “end of men,” if there’s evidence that men are uninterested in competing with women in highly competitive fields, Rosin doesn’t present it. My high-school debate experience suggests that women might just as easily spur male competitive instincts (however futilely) as blunt them.

The situation among working and middle-class women is very different. If the professional-class story is primarily about the “rise” of women, the working-class story is primarily about the “end”—or at least the fall—of men. We’ve seen this movie before—in the post-civil rights African-American community, in 19th-century Ireland, in the Jewish shtetl of the Russian Empire, and in vast swathes of America during the Great Depression. The rise of matriarchal family structures in each of these contexts was a consequence of economic deprivation—specifically, the scarcity of work sufficiently remunerative to sustain the male position as an essential provider.

There’s nothing really new about women stepping up to the challenge of filling the gap. If feminism and the ascent of the service economy have made it possible for today’s working-class women to do much more effective filling than had previous generations, that’s all to the good, but it doesn’t change the fact that, among the working class, this is a narrative of decline, not of the “rise” of anybody.

The psychological adjustments that professional-class men and women have to make are, of course, interesting in their own right, particularly to us folks in the professional classes. I’m in something of a see-saw marriage myself, having ditched my Wall Street career to pursue my much less remunerative literary dreams, and the way this has changed the dynamics in my house—mostly for the better, mind you—are endlessly fascinating to me (and may owe something to my experience competing against Rosin in high school).

But the ways in which the experiences of the professional classes apply to a laid-off factory worker are distinctly limited. And their utility to a policymaker thinking about the economic and social consequences of the breakdown of that factory worker’s marriage are pretty much nugatory.

Rosin’s confidence in the durability of the rungs of the ladder that women are climbing is also subject to question—not because of women’s abilities but because of trends in the economy. Healthcare, for example, has been the largest, most stable job-generating sector through the last three recessions, and from pharmacies to nursing homes to hospitals it’s a sector increasingly dominated by women. But healthcare now absorbs an unsustainably large fraction of the American economy, and front and center of the national agenda is figuring out how to stretch that dollar farther. How will the inevitable restructuring of healthcare change the employment landscape for women?

Rosin’s book is, in a sense, the mirror image of the flawed Charles Murray book Coming Apart. Both recognize major changes in the national culture and in family structure and suspect that those changes are related. Murray suggests that the professional classes have pulled away from the working class culturally and come to their own arrangements that work fine for them, but that have proved disastrous for the working class. If only the elite would get out of their bubbles and participate more in working-class culture, he suggests, maybe their stable-marriage ways would rub off, and the burgeoning economic and social deprivations of the working class would be ameliorated.

Rosin similarly seems to be arguing that the professional classes have worked (or, at least, are working) out new, more egalitarian arrangements that make better use of women’s talents and abilities and will ultimately make everybody—men and women—happier. If only working-class men could accommodate themselves to similar arrangements, then their own marital lives would become more stable and happier, and who knows, maybe even the growing economic and social deprivations of the working class would be mitigated.

But it’s just possible that the arrow of causality runs the other way: that it’s not that men haven’t adapted as quickly as women to the opportunities presented, but that the experience of doors closing—which is what men have experienced as first factories closed and then the housing boom busted—is very different from the experience of doors opening. The difference between a successful see-saw professional marriage and a stressed-out waitress going to pharmacy school at night while trying to mother her two children by herself has more to do with trends in wages than with trends in culture. And the economic trends that women are adapting to successfully may, in some cases, be trends that can and should be resisted.

Rosin is smart enough to be aware of this. And she’s to be applauded for trying to look at trends and see them for what they are, without imposing a pre-existing frame, whether socially conservative or evolutionary-psychological—Rosin professes to be agnostic on that “brain science” stuff, as am I—or, for that matter, classically feminist, the corner from which she’s taken the most flak. But merely by virtue of collecting these different trends under the same pink-fonted cover, she is imposing another frame that may not be accurate. The “end of men” and the “rise of women” may both be real, if limited, trends, and are certainly worth studying. But they may not be two sides of the same story. They may be two only peripherally related stories, the one requiring a policy response that has much more to do with class than with gender, the latter needing little more than the time and freedom to let consenting adults work out what arrangements suit them.

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|All of my coaches when I first competed debate and forensics were women. And they were great. You go Mrs. Smith and cute as a button. And with some embarrassment, the name my 6th grade speech coach escapes me. Not even Lyndon Johnson could have stood up to her.

Now about this book reveiw:

Does that mean we get to blame women for the current state of affairs. It was my understanding that the introduction of women was supposed make us all more humane, more considerate.

As I recall women were all but handing out the ammunition to liberate the women of Iraq and Afgahnistan. They supported tortue. They cheered at that sham of Trial for Saddaam and his staff. Conservative women applauded the use of quotas in Iraq and Afgahnistan — I guess they work there – not here. Bullying has become a national obsession – snore. According to women men are hiding rape statistics. Women are no less inclined to have affairs in the workplace. Women execs harrass men. The women executves of Wall Street were no less inclinde to pass along worthless products to unsuspecting customners. Our world was to be a safer, happier place because of women.

Many stars ago, when I but a eager ROTC student at advance camp. Thefre was a female officer examining my push-ups. She kept removing counts because I wasn;t going all the way down. I break out on chlorophyl – it;s very strange, but I get hives if spend too much time there. I didn’t say much, but by my thritieth her 20th. I was fit to be tied. And she knew it. By the end, I had enough of her. She couldn’t fight. She wasn’t going to be the one covering my backside in battle. What in the heck was she doing here if she couldn’t be there. There was another aspect in play, but that is another story.

I would need to read the book, but women have excelled not only because they have talent, but the workplace has been tailored to the post modern critique. Men are the reason women are subservient and put down. She talks about adjustment. Does she discuss sensitivity training, hostile workplaces 9this caught men off guard — for them: it’s always been a hostile work environment — it’s work. Most men aren’t harrassing their female co-workers and aren’t attempting to initimidate women any more than intimidate I sound like a mysogynist, women are indeed entitled to work and obtain equal pay for equal work. But unless her book reflects the impact of role assignment historically, it will have ignored the single factor in make female dynamics.

No one mentions this, but I will. The infusuion of women into the workplace without consideration of the impact on employment, and homelife – family life: a mom, dad and kids. As a socirty we had no thought of the economic impact on this dynamic. Forexample much is made of less pay for women – there was a very practical reason for that practice. And it was not maliscious.

Well, if I read her book, i am going to keep my copy of The Myth of Male Power right next to it.

Certain points in this article are great examples of the bruised sexual ego revenge psychosis typical of the “Men’s Movement” counter-feminists.

For me, the rise of women began in my sophomore year of high school.

I’m not sure what generation you belong to, but for us, girls were the power animals in schools until about eleventh or twelfth grade. By second year of college, their dominance had fizzled. Even the girls who had been student council presidents were no longer filling the roles one would hope to find “Alpha” males in.

Suffice it to say that we faced them eight times over two years, lost all eight rounds, and I’m still not really over it. So you can imagine my excitement when the opportunity presented itself for me to review her first book, The End of Men. Unfortunately, I found the book to be thought-provoking and engagingly written. So much for round 9.

Still not over it? Man, it was HIGH SCHOOL. Just one paragraph earlier you hint at the salacious thrill of the whole ordeal. Most men are good at just moving on to the next good catch. Obsession ain’t healthy.

The thrust of the book, as the title suggests, is that these trends are related, and what they portend is, on the whole, very good for women but a mixed bag for men (and children).

Good for women? Tell that to all the single citadine demoiselles who live in constant fear of being raped or mugged or even worse because they have no husband/brother/father nearby to escort them home at night. Unfortunately, they’ve been poisoned by a culture that tells them being an “independent woman” is a good thing.

What the article misses is that men – Sade, Laclos and Hefner – invented and propagated feminism as a means of ripping women away from the men who protect them in order to better exploit them. The real problem is the loss of moral certitude in men, and the price is not be the rise of women and decline of men but the collapse of social order.

I think I read it in a Steven Pinker book, it mentioned that women on average are more intelligent than men, but on the two extremes of the intelligence curve – men excel. So most village idiots are men but then so are all chess champions and physics legends, in between women are slightly smarter than men, but not that much smarter to dominate. Until we come to an age where men have babies like women, the idea of women lording over men like Amazon queens will not happen.

“They may be two only peripherally related stories, the one requiring a policy response that has much more to do with class than with gender, the latter needing little more than the time and freedom to let consenting adults work out what arrangements suit them.”

This puts in a nutshell what I feel is the great weakness of The Atlantic’s ongoing series of “gender” pieces; which, judging by the enthusiasm with which they’ve been received clearly addressing the concerns of their readership (IIRC median household income $110K) seem almost willfully, or laughably, or painfully blind to how far away from daily life these concerns are for many women, or men, or anybody not living life in the upper-middle class.

I am reminded of a time, several years ago, when a neighbor couple of was out strolling with their new infant. As they passed by I cut the motor on my law mower to make the customary small-talk that makes living in a village pleasant.

As the father of two young children, and ersatz stay-at-home-dad, I found myself gobsmacked when the conversation turned to childcare, and I actual was on the receiving end of someone saying, with total sincerity, “Well you know good help is so hard to find.”

I finished mowing my lawn in a bit of a daze, but recovered my equilibrium when I remember that earlier in the week I had been venting some of my own anxieties about what to do with that years contribution to my SEP-IRA with the local surfboard shaper.

I see no evidence that Bronx Science or Stuyvesant or Harvard or anywhere else have perfected a method for teaching self-awareness.

Those interested in further understanding “the rise of women” and plummeting birth rates in the US could do worse than reading Roger Devlin’s seminal essay, “Sexual Utopia in Power”: (http://www.scribd.com/doc/23724929/Sexual-Utopia-in-Power-Devlin). There is also a host of blogs drawing connections between the ideas in Devlin’s writing, which are largely based on evolutionary psychology, and the current state of relations between the sexes in America. See, for example, Heartiste, who says in rebuttal to Rosin’s book, “Men are adapting. They’re just not adapting in the way that women…would like them to adapt. The means to acquire a good wage, and the incentive to leverage a good wage to attract women, have both diminished to the point that caddishness and porn have become better alternatives for many men.”

I agree very much with David Ryan about the Atlantic. I subscribed for a year and it was interesting enough, but I did find all the perspectives advanced to be quite obviously from above my economic station-status. The magazine was never over my head intellectually (I went to college and read a million books afterwards, though never translated academics and study into economic success), but I could tell the Atlantic is by and for people who really do live in a different world, in glamorous NYC high rises doing intellectual work or running lucrative businesses, etc.

While subscribing I read the sensationalist cover article “The End of Men,” which reminded me of an article I read online at the Atlantic a few years earlier, about women turning to sperm banks because they were too successful and happy with their lives as is to risk screwing it up with a relationship –or because they didn’t think the men they were temporarily with had superior-enough DNA, etc.

I think a better framework of analysis (but with considerably less commercial and pop-gender-studies interest) would be the End OF the MIDDLE CLASS. As the reviewer here notes, there are historic crumblings of the economy, particularly through “free trade” export of 6 million manufacturing jobs and all the additional millions of multiplier-effect jobs those mfg jobs would have supported. So with the USA down about 10 million jobs and all the loss of industrial capacity, skills and knowledge that cripples our county’s future wealth-creation, it is ironic that the author instead sees the rise of women rather than a bigger fall of America. After all, how long will women’s new prosperity last if the larger country is headed towards third world patterns of wealth distribution and decaying industries and infrastructure leading to lack of competitiveness leading to….mass poverty. How long will women’s relative prosperity survive that larger picture?

Women should, in theory, be superior rhetoricians and thus debaters, given their natural indifference to truth. Most men are not enthusiastic practitioners of deception, and are apt to stumble in the effort.

it’s very important to focus on the fact that this is a book largely about the middle class. we from the proletariat have not had to face this situation nearly so starkly. in a home that was perfectly typical of my corner of the culture, my mother, an RN, half a century ago had more education and a higher status job than my father, a city employee, who earned about the same money (i think) but had the pension. if rosin thinks she’s describing changes in the “traditional working class,” she’s wrong. millman’s comment:

“But the ways in which the experiences of the professional classes apply to a laid-off factory worker are distinctly limited.”

is right.

btw we from the Hearn Society had no worry about losing to anyone else’s debate team.

I’ve been reading that the female crime rate is rising for 40 years, but it never seems to have actually risen much. In particular, homicides among women are way down, as killing your no-good husband or boyfriend has given way to just leaving. Exactly what female crimes are up?

Women(girls) are much more organized and conforming than Men(boys) and are much more reluctant to accept naked risk for the sake of a creative or intellectual impulse or defy orthodoxy. Anyone who has taught a difficult analytical subject to both, as I have, is well aware of this, which echoes the statement you quote from a female executive about hiring men for creative or analytical tasks.

Indeed, I believe that the increasingly regulated and risk-averse nature of American society is due to female dominance of important institutions. The only industry making significant advances is the computer/internet/software industry, and women are an insignificant force in the creative process there, although they are frequently administrators.
There will be a great price to be paid if this trend is not reversed–think of Britain after 1900.

What if there was no aid to dependent children? What if women got no help from the state if they were single moms? Would that change the dynamics any?
Could we now say that all American men are cuckolds by legal fiat–raising children (via welfare) that they did not sire?

Bottom line is that the notion of “equality” we were sold in the 60s has turned out to be a chimera. Either men rule or women rule, and the latter promises to be a world in which any accusation by a female against a male is sufficient for job dismissal, imprisonment, child support theft, etc. All based on her “feelings” and not on any objective evidence.

The changes that Rosin smugly characterizes as “permanent” are nothing of the sort. Let her explain that in 30 years, when her (my) people will be almost all members of patriarchal Orthodox sects, while today’s secular Jews condemn themselves to oblivion by their embrace of all the latest fashions in feminism, gay pride, intermarriage, etc.

By the way, I went to Bronx Science too–long before Noah Millman did. I was disgusted, but not surprised, to receive an alumni newsletter heralding the new female majority among the student body. It’s always about competition, and not forming families, isn’t it?

The changes that Rosin smugly characterizes as “permanent” are nothing of the sort. Let her explain that in 30 years, when her (my) people will be almost all members of patriarchal Orthodox sects, while today’s secular Jews condemn themselves to oblivion by their embrace of all the latest fashions in feminism, gay pride, intermarriage, etc.

Bottom line, right there. Women need men as protectors or they will be abused by predatory males. This is the case because it is women who make the larger physical investment in reproduction. Therefore, if they cannot find men who will make a large physical investment in THEM and in child-rearing, they will perish.

The savviest of feminists understand that this is the source of inequality, and that if it were men who made the babies we would not be men but women. Therefore, they limit reproduction through contraceptives and abortion and the denunciation of the patriarchal family. Non-feminists who understand this onslaught refuse to play that game.

Wow CK, Heartiste is such a manly locker-room kinda site, I’m impressed. With words such as “fem-c*nt”, “mangina”, and the classic “n****r” being bandied about on the same page as quotes from Pope Paul VI.

My own personal observation is that men of my grandfather’s generation were perhaps more closed minded about women’s roles in society but seem much more respectful towards women in general than today’s men.

My confidence that we face no real threat from the unapologetically male-dominated societies in the Islamic world has rested on a sense that a society that squelches the talents of 50% of the population is not firing on all cylinders. It will therefore suffer by comparison with those that encourage everyone to develop and contribute according to their potential.

Now, as already observed, we see three women for every two men in college, with college admissions offices scrambling to prevent an even greater disparity. Almost everyone else with any influence seems quite complacent with this trend, despite distress rockets from a few authors such as Christina Hoff Sommers (The War Against Boys) and Leonard Sax (Boys Adrift). These are not the best of times to be a boy. Is the West beginning to make the same mistake in mirror image?

My confidence that we face no real threat from the unapologetically male-dominated societies in the Islamic world has rested on a sense that a society that squelches the talents of 50% of the population is not firing on all cylinders. It will therefore suffer by comparison with those that encourage everyone to develop and contribute according to their potential.

Despite what feminists may say, raising 3 to 4 children apiece is not AT ALL “squelching the talents” of these young women. Quite the contrary, my lad. Just because they’re being productive in a way other than becoming directresses of marketing for unproductive kleptocratic corporations breaking down at their Time of the Month because the workplace is too stressful for them to handle does not mean that their talents are being squelched. (And before anyone hates on me, check out that link: the article was written by a female HR guru whose work I have admired and respected for years.)

Once again, demography is destiny.

Your observation would have been truer from the eighth through the early twentieth centuries: Islam does not value female cognitive input as much as Christendom once did. However, I would not say that women are particularly “valued” in the West in our day and age. Work is degrading, especially to women.

Now, as already observed, we see three women for every two men in college, with college admissions offices scrambling to prevent an even greater disparity. Almost everyone else with any influence seems quite complacent with this trend, despite distress rockets from a few authors such as Christina Hoff Sommers (The War Against Boys) and Leonard Sax (Boys Adrift). These are not the best of times to be a boy. Is the West beginning to make the same mistake in mirror image?

The problem, once again, is the MALES who allow this to happen. Let us choose to dissociate ourselves from these androgynes and wait for them to die off.

But you don’t need to reproduce biologically in order to spread an ideology. There were more feminists in 1975 then there were in 1950, but obviously feminists did not have an explosion in birthrates during that time period.

Yes, Selvar, point well taken, but the difference is that in 2012 conservatives have (at least for the most part) a better consciousness of the dangers of the libertine culture around them and are therefore in a better position, if they so desire (many cannot be bothered), to inoculate themselves and their offspring.

Do you gentlemen have any notion of how thick the misogyny is in this thread?

Women are more comfortable lying then men are?

If staying home and raising 3 or 4 children is such good noble work, then it’s good for fathers of children with working mothers, also.

Cuckold to legal fiat — women in the work force? What does this nonsense even mean?

No aid for children (do you mean AFDC? that vanished long ago) in poverty? Those children have fathers, too, you know. So starve them, rather like Norquist wants to starve the government

Women need protectors so they don’t fear being raped? (Did you know most rapes are not from a stranger?)

Even the review itself reeks of a certain level of misogyny.

Men, with the exception of David Ryan and Paul Emmons, you’ve not done yourselves proud on this thread.

I wonder if you dare admit what you’ve written here to your wives, presuming they didn’t dump you long ago. With these kinds of attitudes, I wouldn’t be surprised to find that’s common amongst this crowd.

The misogynists are the ones who advocate send including women in active combat to come home to their families mutilated or in multiple pieces. And if a stay-at-home father performs a laudable task, as does a bread winning mother, the exceptions reinforce the rule by virtue of being just that: EXCEPTIONS. Gloria Steinem may think that if men could get pregnant abortion would be a sacrament, but she misses the point that the fact that a woman has a womb and a man doesn’t is exactly what is at the origin of traditional sex role differentiation itself and not just the moral reactions we have acquired around this configuration. It’s a little like speculating what would have happened if Mike Tyson hadn’t bitten that guy’s ear off: he wouldn’t be Mike Tyson. Sex differentiation is a fact, and any harsh words I have are for the men who whine about unfair treatment. Act like a man and tough it out, I say.

As for rapist boyfriends or male acquaintances, I wonder to what extent the woman in question actually “knows” them? I would be shocked if most “known” rapists were close male buddies that the woman has known and bantered with over drinks both with others and just between them for the last five years with no incidents. Get what I’m saying? There was a time when several years passed before one could truly know and trust someone. These days we’ve lost all sense of permanence and real connection, and people are trying desperately to make up for it – by shedding their standards of prudence and propriety. Regrettably, lonely individuals are always the most vulnerable, in EVERY way, and predators know this and take advantage of it. It’s not, strictly speaking, the “fault” of the lonely person (even if many people ARE lonely through their own fault) – fault is about what one does and not about what happens to said person – , but it is a real and observable tragedy.

I have in adulthood gone through periods of loneliness and been taken advantage of, even criminally, even assaulted physically. I took it as a learning experience as to how to cope with being alone without becoming dependent. But do I think I’d have been less vulnerable had I had a family member or a good friend by my side? Absolutely, and not just because they would have been there to stand up for me: there were certain places I wouldn’t have gone, certain company I wouldn’t have sought had I not been searching for what I felt was missing. I was very fortunate: I recovered and I eventually found the friends I wanted. A lot of people don’t. In modern society, such tragedies are increasingly the norm and not the exception. We can and should and indeed must call into question the creeds and tenets underlying such a society.

Finally, Zic, not knowing you personally, I’ll not be so improprietous as to insinuate that your lover, if you have one, ought to drop you for passing such judgments on the basis of scant evidence on the private lives of people you know nothing about, but I’ll just quip that my experience is that most decent mates, of either sex, don’t find busybodies particularly attractive.

Most women today are not pregnant for the vast majority of their lives, nor are women of child bearing age rare in terms of population. Thus, gender differences based on the ability to bear children are far less significant then they were in the past. That is not to say that innate gender roles don’t exist, but they are neither rigid nor exclusive. For example, there will always be more male truck drivers then female truck drivers, but this does not mean that female truck drivers don’t exist. I should also remind you that marital rape has been considered legal in most patriarchal/traditional societies. Really the concept of fathers/brothers/husbands protecting women brings up the question of “who will watch the watchers?” Lastly, in every comment on this thread you have made it a point to blame men- and only men- for society’s problems. I guess, you have more in common with radical feminists then you think.

I do not dispute any of Selvar’s factual points. The question is whether, because traditional, institutional, organic protective mechanisms are defective we ought to do away with them altogether. As an analogy: some police officers are accused of being corrupt and racist (I will suppose for the sake of argument that both these labels can in fact be applied to some of them). Should we not have any cops?

Another one: the legislature checks the executive branch. The judicial branch checks the legislative branch. The executive branch checks the judicial branch. But what if they’re all in cahoots?

This is where we get into the problem of living in an imperfect (sinful) world, with entropy (death) all around us and only constant energy input (the fighting force of life) to keep it going (to save us). (If one is a Christian, one may also describe the universe in terms of Original Sin as well as evolutionary drift.)

We can resign ourselves to fighting or we can perish. If we are resigned to fighting, then on a personal level we must respect our obligations to those we interact with on a day-to-day basis. On a grander (governmental) scale, we have a choice. We can:

1. appreciate the infinite complexities and permutations of the experience of life and set up boundaries through (sacred) institutions and constitutions (which in their most important form are always unwritten; see Joseph de Maistre’s Generative Principle), boundaries which over time organize our energies, improving the collective lot of humanity into a civilized state, or

2. become so fixated on finding a solution to every prominent case of individual malaise that we put our faith in the unscientific and false god of a single worldly overseer to trample and redefine relationships at will, scattering our energies and returning us to (at best) barbarism.

In modern society, we have chosen the latter. Its manifestation with regards to the issue at hand is the state occupying the role with regards to women that fathers, brothers and husbands once occupied. It may have a salutary effect in individual cases. On the whole, it is upending society.

Your quip about my own relationship with feminists is clever and amusing and would make a most effective talking point if we were to reduce this discussion to the level of CNN/Fox News/Presidential Debate sound bites, but at the heart it is fatally flawed. Where I differ from feminists is that I blame individual men for this mess, while they blame masculinity as a whole AND bite the hand that fed them. How many feminists regularly acknowledge the work Godwin and Wilson did in contributing to the present state? (I do not expect them to acknowledge the work of Laclos or Sade, since that would be tantamount to conceding their ideology to be fundamentally abusive.)

Yes, but much of this leaves me asking questions. For example: “The increasing roster of professions that are turning into primarily female preserves—without, she argues, becoming low-wage occupational ghettos.”

Are we talking of professions that are actually helping the US economy/society or f***ing it up? I notice women are over-represented in both the civil service and jobs like “diversity counselors”. Also, some jobs like academia have become increasingly female and increasingly low-paid (because of the replacement of tenured faculty with adjuncts). I need a comparison among the professions being feminized — how many are losing as well as gaining.

Also: “The rise of female-headed and -dominated households among the traditional middle and working classes.”

Oh yay! Single mothers — whose offspring are more likely to commit crimes, commit suicide, drop out of school, divorce, suffer from mental illness, fail to form stable relationships, etc.

Also: “The ways in which highly educated couples are navigating the two-career household, developing what she calls the “see-saw” marriage, in which partners take turns being the primary breadwinner.”

Yes, but fifty years ago, a single male breadwinner could support a family of five (father, mother, three kids). This “factoid” fails to address the realities of shrinking opportunities in American society — for men and women.

Also: “The striking rise in the female crime rate.”

Yes, but this probably has more to do with the insane war on drugs (women busted for using drugs or acting as mules) rather than, say, the Mafia being feminized. I mean, has the number of female bank robbers actually increased?

All of this seems to have less to do with the rise of women than the decline of the United States. Clambering to the top mast of a sinking ship is not really progress….

Thank you for acknowledging the existence of the working class. Our adversarial relationship is with the ruling class. Not men or women or black or white people. The striving, educated upper middle class are ruling class wannabes. Working class women have never seen the glass ceiling. They are fully occupied with the rent and the groceries.

Boys become men when manhood is modeled for them by men who have successfully navigated the transition. Boys raised by women can be good boys or bad boys but not men. Mothers – see that your boys have one or more adult men in their life. This will be a service to your sons AND your daughters.